Rosh Hashanah Sermon on Israel (Day 1)

 

When I became your Rabbi 13 years ago, I was asked by a congregant about my goals.  I answered that one of my goals was to help Congregation Beth Shalom develop a closer relationship with Israel.  As a University Junior I had been a student at the One Year Program at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Israel became the centerpiece of my Jewish identity.  I longed to return. It took me 33 years before I was able to take my second trip to Israel when I had the opportunity to study at the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Rabbinic Torah Study Seminar in Jerusalem in 2006. Since becoming your Rabbi I have traveled to Israel fifteen times, including leading several invaluable rich and transformative  congregational trips. Naturally I am aware that many of you must have visited Israel on your own.    Many of our students have visited Israel through organized trips like Taam Yisrael for eighth graders or Birthright for young adults. We have had congregants who have lived in Israel for extended periods of time, and some have made aliyah to Israel. We have studied about Israel through the Hartman program, through the Melton program and in the Thursday morning Study Group. In addition, we have had a series of guest speakers who have further enhanced and contributed to our knowledge of Israel. Also, for the past several years adults have been able to study and learn modern Hebrew through our Adult Education Program.  From where I stand I would say that we as a congregation have become more inquisitive and more knowledgeable, more understanding and more connected as well as more cognizant and closer to Israel 

 

Yet, American Jewry has been drifting away from Israel, particularly when it comes to our younger generation of Jews. The recent Pew Study of American Jewry found that Twenty-seven percent -- about one quarter of those between 18 and 29 say caring about Israel is not important to them, compared with 8% of those over 65 who say the same.  Support for boycotting Israel — at 13% — is nearly double in that age group compared to older generations. 25% of American Jews agree that Israel is an “Apartheid State”. 

 

This rather  alarming and painful situation has been hard,  both for those of us who love Israel in the United States and for Israelis. Ron Dermer, former Israeli ambassador to the United States, caused a bit of a kerfuffle back in May when he said that Israel would be better off prioritizing building relationships with American evangelicals than with the American Jewish community. He opined that the backbone of Israel’s support in the United States is Evangelical Christians, both because they far outnumber Jews in the United States and because of their -- and here I quote -- “passionate and unequivocal support for Israel”. American Jews, he added are - quote -- “Disproportionately among our critics”. 

 

 Rabbi Daniel Gordis writes in his 2018 book, Divided We Stand, that American Jewry’’s ambivalence toward Israel is not only about what Israel does, but, more fundamentally, it is related to what Israel is. Based on what Rabbi Gordis postulates  in this book, I want to outline three reasons that can help us understand the ambivalent, sometimes turbulent and often confusing  relationship between American Jews and Israel.

 

First, we need to recognize that Israel's purpose and mission is fundamentally different from that of the United States.

Second, we need to understand that Israeli Jews and American Jews have very different ideas about Jewish identity.

Third, we need to acknowledge how our hopes and expectations of Israel to be “a light unto the nations” in the words of the prophet Isaiah, have not been fully realized, and how painful that is for us. 

 

Point number one: Mission and purpose: 

Israel is a Jewish State created for Jews. And the United States?   

 

Engraved on the base of the Statue of Liberty, the iconic symbol of America, is a poem by the American Jew, Emma Lazuras. In part, it reads

From her beacon-hand/ Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore; Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me; I lift my lamp before the golden door.” 

The United States, according to this poem, has a mission to welcome all the people in the world. We are, as we say in Yiddish, Die Goldene Medina, a beacon of hope, a land where dreams come true. Throughout American history, at times, some have been more welcome than others. But as an ideal, as an aspiration, and at times as a  reality, people from  around the world,  of all religions, of all races, of all ethnicities,  have been  welcome to our shores. 

 

Israel’s mission is different. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 favors the establishment of “a national home for the Jewish people” in British ruled Palestine. The United Nations Partition agreement of 1947 divided the British Mandate into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. Unlike the United States, Israel was conceived as a particular land for a particular people. 

Like the United States, Israel is committed to equal rights for all. Non- Jews may be citizens and have equal rights under the law. However, in order for Israel to remain a Jewish State for the Jewish people, a significant majority of the population must be and remain Jewish. When, as demographers tell us, the United States has a majority minority population by 2046, it will be in keeping with our motto and our mission, E pluribus unum, “Out of many- one”. We are a country of peoples from all over the world, joined together to form one nation, the United States of America.  If, on the other hand, Jews cease to be the majority of the population in Israel by 2046, the Zionist dream -- the dream of Jewish self-determination, “to live as a free people in our own land” in the words of HaTikvah -- would have failed. This is why there must eventually be a two-state solution, with the Jewish State and a Palestinian state living side by side in peace. In one, binational state, Arabs would outnumber Jews, thus making Jews, once again, a vulnerable minority in a majority, Muslim land. That has proven too risky and dangerous in the past.

 

Point number 2 -- Jewish identity

Israelis Jews and American Jews also view their Jewishness differently. In 1955, American intellectual and political scholar Will Herberg published a book with the title Catholic Protestant Jew. In it he argued that America was “a three-religion country” and that people no longer identified themselves by their ethnicity, but rather by the religious community to which they belonged. In America, Judaism is a religion. In Israel, Judaism is an ethnicity, a nationality. In Israel You are an Israeli Jew or an Israeli Arab. 

 

This difference in understanding our respective identities plays out in a number of ways.  For instance, the average Israeli has very little understanding of the differences among Reform, Conservative and Orthodox Judaism in the United States. Therefore, when American Jews advocate for equal standing in the public sphere for Conservative and Reform Judaism in Israel, most Israelis have little idea of what we are talking about. When American Jews criticize Israel for its lack of religious pluralism, Israelis counter that their society is an incredibly pluralistic one. There are secular people who eat shrimp on Shabbas, there are Hassidim who follow all the mitzvot, there are communities from North Africa, Yemen, France and South America who have their own synagogues and follow their own particular rituals. How much more pluralistic, how much more tolerant, how much more accepting of differences, does Israel have to be, they ask? Some progressive Israelis may be sympathetic to the Women of the Wall, a group that seeks to achieve the right for women to wear prayer shawls, pray and read from the Torah collectively and out loud at the Western Wall (Kotel) in Jerusalem. But Israeli progressives’ energies are primarily directed toward issues of foreign policy and social equality, not toward whether women can bring a Torah to the Western Wall. 

Point 3 -- Myth versus reality

A third factor contributing to the American Jewish drift away from Israel is the myth of Israel coming into conflict with the reality of everyday life. Let me explain!  My generation grew up in the aftermath of Israel’s War for Independence in 1948……. As we know in that war   a geographically tiny Israel fought for her life and survived the onslaught of five Arab armies.  It was without question a costly but heroic victory. Israel was poor in those years, but determinedly plucky. My generation experienced the lightning victory of the Six Day War, the remarkable rescue at Entebbe, the harrowing vulnerability of the 1973 War with Egypt. But statecraft is messy business, politics requires compromises, and the reality of surviving in a hostile region forced successive Israeli governments to make difficult decisions that, at times, led to questionable decisions and actions that are difficult to defend.

 

Some of these decisions and actions, in turn, have led others to question Israel’s very right to exist as a nation. 

Without taking into account the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, campaigns have been launched that equate Israeli treatment of Palestinians with the apartheid policies of South Africa in the mid-20th century. They demand divestment of Israeli companies from university, church, municipal, union and other portfolios. They demand the boycott of Israeli products, professionals, professional associations, academic institutions, and artistic performances. They  demonize Israel and seek to isolate Israel from the rest of the nations of the world. They assign one-sided blame to Israel, and, by association, supporters of Israel, for the conflict. They demand that Israel fix the problem without asking anything in return from Palestinians or other Arab states, who are consistently described as powerless victims of Israel. 

 

This “anti-zionism” is increasingly difficult to distinguish from anti-semitism, and, in fact there have been significant increases in verbal and physical attacks against Jews in the West. This has led Israeli politician and intellectual Einat Wilff to suspect that “it’s not that attacks on Jews in the West are the unfortunate and unintended consequence of the persistent demonization of Israel, but rather the demonization of the Jewish state is undertaken so as to re-legitimize attacks on Jews in the West.” In other words, Israeli actions are not the cause or precipitant of expressions of anti-semitism in the West; they are an excuse for expressions of anti-semitism in the West.

 

 Scholar and Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, one of the most influential thinkers in contemporary Jewish life, writes, “The Jewish state—no matter how it strives—is incapable of being ethically without blemish. All exercises of power by all human entities are inescapably flawed. Therefore, Israel’s right to exist cannot depend on its meeting the perfection standard of ethics……….. If the Jewish state’s fate is conditioned on its meeting a certain standard of moral excellence—and other nations not so—then this is a double standard that endangers Israel. …..unrealistic expectations and conditioned support for its right to existence are unfair and immoral.” 

My main message for you this morning is, please, don’t give up on Israel. It is not the perfect country that we would wish for -- but no country is perfect. Israel does not always make us proud; it sometimes makes us sad and often exasperates us.   We are critical of the lack of separation of church and state resulting in the stranglehold that the Haredi community has over lifecycle affairs in Israel. We are hurt by the dismissive attitude taken by Israeli religious authorities to American expressions of our Jewish faith. We are frustrated by the seemingly endless wars, by the settlements in Judea and Samaria and by the lack of progress on the Palestinian front. Our response, however, should not be to wash our hands of Israel, to turn our backs on the Jewish State. Rather, as partners with God, we American Jews must redouble our efforts to strengthen Israel, even when her actions elicit conflicting feelings in us.  Part of that effort is to encourage Israel to treat all her citizens, Jewish and Arab, and her neighbors, including the Palestinians, with dignity, with decency and with respect. We must convince Israel that there is more than one expression of Judaism, and that Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist and other formulations of Judaism need to be recognized, accepted and legitimized. Finally we must  use our influence as American citizens to assure that the United States remains a reliable -- and understanding -- ally on the world stage. 

Shana Tova

Photo by Taylor Brandon on Unsplash

Sermon for Rosh Hashanah Eve 5782

 

 

As most of you may know, ten days ago I announced my retirement as Rabbi of  Congregation Beth Shalom effective June, 2023. In making this decision I am reminded of the parent who sends a note to explain her son's tardiness for kindergarten. “Please excuse Johnny for being late for school this morning. Nine o’clock came sooner than expected.” 

 

We may feel that my retirement from Congregation Beth Shalom comes “sooner than expected” but in fact it is coming at the right time. When I arrived at CBS in 2008 I  was the fourth rabbi of the synagogue in eight years.  Although the synagogue was thriving in terms of numbers, it was also struggling to maintain consistent leadership, a sense of direction and stability.  I hope, if anything, I have provided that. 

 

I am reminded, as well, about the first time I made such an announcement to a previous synagogue. Before I was ordained as a Rabbi, and during my student years at seminary, I had a pulpit for three years at a small synagogue in Holyoke, Massachusetts. The synagogue had hoped I would stay on after I was ordained. However, I decided to accept a position at a different synagogue in a larger Jewish community nearby. Over the three years that I was in Holyoke, I became very close with the congregation. When I told them that I would be moving on, they were disappointed, even a bit angry. One of the members, a man in his late eighties, looked at me sadly and said, “And we thought you cared about us!” 

 

Of course, I did care about them, I reassured him, but I needed to think about myself, my future and the future of my family. So, I had to make the painful decision to leave them and move on, a decision that eventually brought me here.  I want to assure all of you that even though I am leaving as your rabbi, I care about you. Being your rabbi has meant that every day one or more of you, in ways small and large, have touched my heart. I hope that on occasion I may have provided a bit of that uplift for you too.

 

Naturally I am not finished with my work here. I have two more years with you, but those two years, as we  know, will fly by, as have the previous thirteen!  However, it was necessary to announce my retirement now in order that as a congregation you can plan for your future. If needed I will be available to think through those plans with you.

 

 Rosh Hashanah is a time to reflect on the past, both as individuals and as a community. What a year the world has had!   The Covid 19 pandemic has not  only shaken all institutions throughout the world but it has led to a  worldwide crisis in every synagogue, every church, every mosque. The crisis has been felt by every individual, in  every home, in every family. These tumultuous times have brought about enormous levels of stress, of anguish and of loss. As one wag put it, these past 18 months have been like experiencing the flu pandemic of 1918, the economic instability of 1919 and the political turmoil of 1968 all rolled into one!

 

Last Rosh Hashanah was the first Rosh Hashanah in history where every Jew, wherever they lived in the world, stayed home for the holiday. Instead of crowding into synagogues, we watched services on our computers. Instead of gathering with family and friends to enjoy a festival meal we ate alone.  We were instructed to practice “social distancing”. One of our congregants commented that “social distancing” was the opposite of Judaism.

 

This New Year brings a different kind of stress. We thought it would be over by now, but we are still living our lives thinking about, worrying about, and planning around the pandemic. There have been tragic losses, and there are many kinds of grief being exhibited.  Grieving over loved ones, but also grieving over opportunities lost, a lifestyle lost, and a concern that we don’t know what post-pandemic will look like.

 

 We often don’t appreciate what we have until we are in danger of losing it. The writer Mitch Albom, who became famous with the publication of his book Tuesdays with Morrie, published another book, Have a Little Faith.  In it, he returns to the Jewish community of his childhood in New Jersey.  He writes about coming to terms with all he had left behind and lost.  His plans as a young man – to become 'a citizen of the world' -- had largely come true, he writes.  He had friends in different time zones. He'd been published in foreign languages. He had lived all over the world.

 

He writes, "You can touch everything and be connected to nothing. I knew airports better than local neighborhoods.  I knew more names in other area codes than I did on my block."  Most of his relationships, he writes, were through the workplace.  Then he thought about workplace friends who were fired or had quit due to illness.  "Who comforted them?" he wonders, "Where did they go? Not to me. Not to their former bosses."

 

Often, he concludes, they were helped and supported by their church or synagogue communities. "Members took up collections. They cooked meals. They gave money to pay bills. They did it with love, empathy and knowledge that it was part of the supportive undercarriage of a "sacred community", like the one I guess I once belonged to, even if I didn't realize it."

 

We too often do not realize what we have in our sacred community. We take it for granted or feel disappointed by its shortcomings. We often notice what is missing rather than what is there. 

 

When the Coronavirus struck 18 months ago, we as a sacred community faced quite a challenge. How were we to maintain synagogue life without being able to come together in the temple? How do we make “social distancing” compatible with Jewish communal life?  It was not only an issue of gathering for worship. The very undercarriage of our community had been pulled from us by the virus. Loved ones died alone in hospital beds, their families unable to be with them in their final moments! How would our community be there for them in their grief and despair? Where before the pandemic hundreds of people might attend a funeral, families now had to bury their dead practically alone. How were we to console the mourner when we could not go to their home for shiva?  How could we help the bar and bat mitzvah families -- families  that had been looking forward to a synagogue packed with family and friends --  experience the holiness of a bar or bat mitzvah from the confines of their home with only the immediate family present?  How were we going to educate our children when they could not gather in the classroom with their teachers? All of this, and more, against a background where parents were worried about losing their jobs, and those who had jobs had to learn a whole new way of working. Adult children worried about their elderly parents, the most vulnerable of the population. And we all dreaded catching Covid, becoming seriously ill and even  dying. 

 

Looking back, the challenges to continuing community life were overwhelming and disorienting.  It reminds me of the parable Rabbi Hayim of Tzanz used to tell:  A man, wandering in the forest for several days, finally encountered another. He called out: "Brother, show me the way out of this forest." The man replied, "Brother, I, too, am lost. I can only tell you this. The ways I have tried have led nowhere; they have only led me astray. Take my hand and let us search for the way together." This is what we did. In the beginning, we were all lost and confused. Yet, we held one another’s hand, and we found our way through this together. So, we all deserve a “yasher koach”!  All of you stepped up. You were heroic this year. Just look at what we have accomplished. We moved our entire synagogue online with no notice. We learned how to mute and unmute ourselves (well, some of us are still learning). We taught, we sang, we consoled, we prayed -- as a community -- while being physically separated. What we did was unprecedented in Jewish history. We not only survived -- we affirmed our values, we supported each other, we found a way, we thrived. For all of this I am profoundly grateful to every single one of you and I want to thank you all. 

 

It was, and continues to be, challenging and extremely difficult work. 

I also want to apologize as well. There were times in this process, when we were reinventing ourselves as a synagogue, that I was not as patient with you as I should have been. There were times when I did not listen as I should have. There were times when I too hastily and abruptly dismissed your suggestions,  you causing you to not feel respected or heard. For this I am deeply sorry. 

 

People sometimes ask me, “Rabbi, when are we going back to ‘normal’?” My answer to you is that we are never going back to “normal”. We will never go back to the way things were before this pandemic. We have been through, and are still going through, the defining crisis of this generation. When the world experiences something like this, we are changed in a myriad of ways, often for good. The ways we practice Judaism, the ways we experience “community”, the ways we learn and the ways we teach are already different because of this pandemic. Some of the old ways we will miss, some of the new ways we will welcome, but of one thing I am certain -- Judaism will adapt to whatever the future will bring because throughout our long and noble history the Jewish People have always met the challenges of “new normals”. When the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed and our People lost the way we worshipped, we adapted and met the challenge. When we lived in the diaspora, when we were oppressed and vilified, when we were threatened with conversion or expulsion or death, we met the challenge. When nations more powerful than we rose to destroy us, we met the challenge. When we returned to Palestine to reclaim our ancestral homeland, we met the challenge. Each and every time, we adapted, we changed, we met the challenge. We belong to a people that does not despair, that it is relentless in its determination to move forward, to overcome hardships, to endure and to contribute to the world.

 

These troubled times present their own unique difficulties and challenges and call for novel, original and fresh responses. Our sages teach that the ram's horn we blow on Rosh HaShana must be kafuf (bent) to reflect our own bodies bent over in grief.  The shevarim (the broken blasts of the shofar) are meant to echo the sound of our own tears. Yet they are always surrounded by tekiah (whole sounds). This teaches us that even though our hearts have been broken we can be whole again and, in fact, even more complete for having experienced that brokenness.

Shana Tova

Photo by Igal Ness on Unsplash

 

What Does It Mean to "Choose Life"? Parasha Nitzavim

 

Next week we will celebrate Rosh Hashanah, with its  evocative prayers and stirring  melodies.  In our Amidah prayer we will add the verses "zachrenu le hayyim, melech hafetz bahayyim, vchatvenu besefer hachayimm"  -- Remember us for life, sovereign who desires life, and inscribe us in the book of life."  The imagery of a "Book of Life" in which G-d inscribes us for the next year comes from the Talmud.  There Rav Kruspedai says in the name of his teacher, Rabbi Yochanan, that there are three books opened in Heaven on the New Year – one for the thoroughly righteous, one for the thoroughly wicked, and one for those in between.  The thoroughly righteous are inscribed immediately in the Book of Life, the thoroughly wicked in the Book of Death, and those who are neither thoroughly righteous nor thoroughly wicked have their fate suspended until the Day of Atonement, when G-d decides their fate.

  The notion that  the  righteous live for the next year, and the wicked die in the next year, doesn't  conform to our experience in life, where the righteous sometimes die young, and the wicked sometimes live long lives. This week’s Torah reading     points us in a different direction when considering what it means to be inscribed in the Book of Life.  In our Torah reading , G-d tells us, "I place life and good before you, and death and evil.  Choose life ………

What is the difference between what the Talmud is teaching, and what the Torah is teaching?  In the passage of the Talmud, G-d is choosing  and inscribing us for life or death.  In the Torah, each individual gets to choose, between the options that G-d sets out before him or her – life and good, death and evil.  

Yet there remains a problem. What does it mean “to choose life”? Do we really have a choice whether to live or to die?  Wouldn’t we all choose life over death, if we had the choice? The Talmud would seem to be accurately reflecting our experience -- who shall live and who shall die in the next year is largely a matter of G-d’s will, or, if you would have it, of fate! The 98 people who died in the Surfside Condominium collapse certainly had no choice in the matter. Had they known there was a chance that the building would collapse, they would have chosen to sleep elsewhere. The over 600,000 Americans who died of Covid in the past 18 months did not die because they failed to “choose life”! They were essentially random victims of a pandemic. The over 2200 people who died in the recent earthquake in Haiti did not die because they failed to “choose life”. They lived in the wrong place at the wrong time! They had no choice.,  -- 

So what could it mean when the Torah tells us to “choose life”? 

By mentioning “life and good” and “death and evil” next to each other in the verse, Moses is saying that every life affirming action that we take in our lives can increase the good in the world. At the same time, there are actions we can take in the world that can be a curse and lead to destruction.  Moreover, because we live in an imperfect world, and because we are all flawed, every action we take is a mixture of good and bad, life affirming and life diminishing,  at the same time. Our goal in life is to live consciously, to be aware of the impact, both positive and negative, of our actions on the world and to shape our behavior toward choosing and maximizing the impact of our actions toward the affirmation of life.

For example, we have to eat in order to survive. But eating involves ending the life of something that is living. Plants likely do not  feel pain, but they do experience sensations. They respond to sunlight, gravity, wind, and even tiny insect bites. If we want to eat fewer plants, and therefore kill less life, we should eat the plants directly, because feeding them to animals and then eating the animals kills more plants! 

Animals surely feel pain and anxiety, and therefore the more plants we eat directly the less suffering we inflict on animals. In the Garden of Eden Adam and Eve were permitted to eat only plant life. Once humanity was expelled from the Garden of Eden, G-d permitted humans to eat meat. But the Torah sets limits on the kinds of animals we are allowed to eat. Moreover, according to Jewish Law, the animals we do eat  must be slaughtered by a shochet, a ritual slaughterer. The shochet recites a blessing before slaughtering the animal, which increases his or her awareness of the holiness of the life about to be taken, and the slaughtering is done in a way that minimizes the pain the animal feels. Although we are permitted to eat meat, doing so is not as life affirming as eating plants. And we certainly are forbidden to kill animals for sport! 

Nor is being a vegetarian  without its costs. People have to harvest crops. We should ask ourselves -- Are they paid well, or are they exploited? The crops have to arrive at our tables, which use fuel from airplanes and trucks adding to the pollution of the environment. Each of our actions has a ripple effect that amplifies both goodness and evil in the world. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”

As we approach the New Year, let us examine our behavior and actions for both the good we do -- our life affirming choices -- and the inevitable downside of those very choices. We can examine our deeds, repent of our transgressions, and resolve to rebalance our behaviors to make more life affirming choices and  reduce the destruction our actions bring to the world. We can all become conscious of both the positive and the negative impact of our actions on ourselves, our loved ones, our neighbors and our world. 

Shabbat Shalom

Repentance and Forgiveness Parsha Shoftim

 

There’s a beautiful Hasidic teaching that says there are five most important mitzvot in the entire Jewish tradition. The first is actually from this week’s portion:

Tamim tihiyeh. Be wholehearted with God. (Deuteronomy 18:13)

Shiviti Adonai. Always place God before you. (Psalms 16:8)

V’ahavta l’reiecha kamocha. Love your neighbor as yourself. (Leviticus 19:18)

B’chol drachecha da’eihu. Wherever you go, recognize God. (Proverbs 3:6)

Hatzneia lechet im Elohecha. Walk humbly with God. (Micah 6:8)

The first letter of each of those teachings — Tov, Shin, Vav, Vet, Heh — spell the Hebrew word, T’shuva, the Jewish concept of Return or Repentance.

This week we begin the month of Elul , the month in which we practice behaviors urging us to return to our holiest selves.

T’shuvah is a step-by-step process of re-engaging with our highest selves, of turning away from negative and destructive tendencies. T’shuvah means embracing that which is good in our nature. T’shuvah is a turning to the virtues of humility, gratitude, generosity, compassion, and loving-kindness.

 The T’shuvah process often begins with a sense of despair, hopelessness, and sadness.  In those moments we feel that we’re forever stuck  and are unable to change the nature, character, or direction of our lives. The story is told of a young Jewish man named Meir, who had strayed from the Jewish faith. He came before Rabbi Israel of Ryzhyn. Rabbi Israel helped him to return to Judaism. A short time later Meir visited with the Rabbi. Rabbi Israel noticed he seemed dejected. “Meir,” my son, “What is troubling you?” asked Rabbi Israel. “If it is your past sins that are bothering you, remember that your repentance made up for everything.” 

Meir replied, “Why should I not be troubled? I keep returning to my old ways over and over. How can I believe that G-d still loves me?” 

Rabbi Israel touched his arm gently and said, “Just as it is our compulsion to sin again and again, so it is G-d’s way and divine compulsion to forgive and pardon again and again.” 

T’shuvah is never easy. It calls for us to be strong of mind, heart, and soul, it calls for us to be willing to suffer failure. We fall, but have the courage to rise and recommit to our struggle -- step-by-step, patiently, one day at a time, one hour at a time, and  one moment at a time. Judaism rejects stagnation, pessimism, and cynicism. Our tradition urges us to overcome those impediments that prevent our personal transformation and the creation of a more hopeful future.

 When successful, T’shuvah enables us to return to our truest selves and overcome the past for the sake of a better future. T’shuvah heals our state of fragmentation and returns us to the person G-d wants us to be. 

 Our parsha for this week contains commandments about our conduct in war. In Deuteronomy 20:19  we read, “When in your war against a city you have to besiege it for a long time to capture it, you must not destroy its trees, for are trees of the field human to withdraw before you into the besieged city?” 

The 13th-century biblical commentator Ibn Ezra interpreted this verse not as a question, but as a statement: “For the human being is a tree of the field.” Which begs the question, “How is a human being like a tree of the field?” What does Ibn Ezra mean? 

 A gardener removes the excess wood from a tree in order to give the tree space, form and light. This strengthens the flow of nourishment to the central branches and gives the tree balance and beauty.

The process of teshuvah works the same way. T’shuvah is about removing the layers that distract, that entangle and that  confuse us. T’shuvah is about getting rid of those aspects that block out the light of our true Self. T’shuvah is about creating harmony, wholeness and peace within the whole of our being.

Shabbat Shalom

 

 

 

 

The Ox and the Donkey Parsha Ki Tetze

 

There are many reasons we have difficulty relating  to the mitzvot that are given in the Torah. Simply put, most of us grew up in urban areas whereas the mitzvot in the Torah were given to people who lived on farms and worked the land. We city dwellers are quite detached from the source of our food. The farmer gets his eggs from the nest and his milk from the barn. He harvests his wheat, and grinds it into flour from which he makes bread. We buy our milk and eggs from the dairy case and our bread comes packaged on the supermarket shelf. I for one have not had personal experiences with agriculture and therefore find the mitzvot related to agriculture in the Torah often difficult to understand. For example, in this week’s parsha we are told that we are prohibited from yoking together a mule and an ox. Do you know what an “ox” is, and how it differs from a cow, a bull or a steer?  I needed to go to the internet to learn that an ox is any cattle over four years old that is trained to do work. An ox can be a cow or a bull, that is, a female or a male, but most often they are “steer”, which is a castrated bull. Farmers castrate the male cattle to make him less aggressive and more amenable to training. I also learned that the farmer needs to teach the ox how to pull a plow and that oxen work in teams. They are trained by a “teamster” who teaches them to follow five verbal commands.  Did you know oxen can learn to follow basic verbal commands? I surely did not know this.  I also learned that  several teams of oxen are used to pull one plow. And that “oxen” not “oxes” is the plural form of ox.

 

That still leaves open the question -- what is wrong with yoking an ox and a mule together? Why would the Torah prohibit that? Having no personal experience in this area I turned to our Biblical commentators. They offer a number of reasons why the Torah prohibits the yoking together of an ox and a mule. 

 

The anonymous  author of Sefer HaChinuh a   the 13th century book, which systematically discusses the 613 commandments, notes that the ox, an animal that chews its cud and has a cloven hoof, is a kosher animal and the donkey, an animal that does not chew its cud and does not have a split hoof, is not a kosher animal. Therefore, G-d does not want these animals, the “pure” and “the impure” working together. 

 

Sefer Chinuch also points out  that the ox is a stronger animal than the donkey, and better suited to the task of plowing. G-d therefore takes pity on these animals, who both might suffer from being yoked together to pull a plow. The ox, having to share the burden of work with the weaker creature, would have to work harder than were he to be joined by a fellow ox. And the donkey, having to work with his far stronger companion, would exhaust himself trying to keep up. 

 

Sefer Chinuch then delves into more psychological reasons for not plowing with an ox and a mule. The author says that animals prefer their own kind. It is not only “birds of a feather that flock together” but all animals prefer to be with their own species. He goes on to extend this insight to human beings. Two people, he says, who are far apart in their temperaments and opinions should never be appointed to perform a task together. It is simply too difficult to get along, to cooperate, to collaborate,   in completing the job at hand.  Sefer Chinuch writes, “If the Torah was strict about the suffering caused for two different species of animal working together that do not have a thinking mind, the same is certainly true for people, who have a thinking soul with which to understand their Creator."

 

A third reason for this prohibition is the sensitivity we need to show animals. Have you ever noticed that when you see a cow it always seems to be chewing something? The reason is that cows must chew their food twice in order to digest it properly. Cows spend nearly eight hours out of every day chewing their cud. (I did not know that either, having never spent 8 hours around a cow).

 

The farmer would of course feed both animals before they went out to work. But the ox would be chewing all the time, which would lead the donkey to think that the ox got more food than he did, or, alternatively, that the ox was always eating on the job! The donkey would think that this was unfair, that the ox was being treated better than he was, and this would demoralize the donkey.

 

There are 74 commandments in this week’s Torah portion, more than any other week in the year. And there are so many commandments in the Torah as a whole that it can be overwhelming. So it is understandable that we focus on the mitzvot that we can relate to: Love your neighbor as yourself, return a lost object when you find it, pay your worker before the sun sets, help the poor and the needy, for example. We therefore tend to ignore or pass over the mitzvot that we cannot relate to, as the one prohibiting plowing with an ox and a donkey together. It is easy to dismiss them or to think they are irrelevant since tractors have long replaced animals for plowing. Or to think they only apply to farmers and not to us suburbanites. But what we find when we study them is that they do relate to us. This mitzvah teaches us about G-d’s compassion for animals and their feelings. This teaches us that even as we need to be sensitive to the needs and feelings of animals, how much more so do we need to be sensitive and compassionate to the needs and feelings of our fellow human beings. 

Shabbat Shalom 

 

Tonight I want to tell you the tale of two disputes. The first is a famous dispute between the conductor Leonard Bernstein and the pianist Glenn Gould. The second is a dispute related in this week’s Torah portion between Moses and Korah.

 

On the evening of  Friday, April 6, 1962, Leonard Bernstein was to conduct the New York Philharmonic in a performance of Brahms D minor Concerto. The guest soloist was Glenn Gould, one of the most celebrated classical pianists of the 20th century. Before the concert began, Mr. Bernstein turned to the audience and spoke to them, something he rarely did.He told the audience that they were about to hear an “unorthodox performance” of Brahms D Minor Concerto, a performance unlike he had ever heard, or even dreamt of. Mr. Gould was going to play the concerto in a way that departed significantly from the way it had traditionally been performed, a way that was incompatible with Mr. Berstein’s own understanding of how it should sound. Sometimes, he explained, a soloist and a conductor have different ideas about how a musical composition is supposed to be performed. But they almost always manage, through persuasion, or charm, or even threats, to achieve a unified performance. This time, however, Mr. Bernstein said, he was forced to submit to Mr. Gould’s wholly new concept of Brahms D Minor Concerto.

 

Why, Leonard Berstein asked, would he have gone along with this? He could, after all, have caused a minor scandal by getting a substitute soloist, or, letting another person conduct! Instead he shared with the audience three reasons for his decision.  First, he said, Glenn Gould was such an accomplished and serious artist that he ought to take anything he conceives in good faith. Second, he found moments in the pianist’s performance that emerged with astonishing freshness and conviction. Third, Glenn Gould brought to music a curiosity, a sense of adventure and a willingness to experiment which Mr. Bernstein admired. Maestro Bernstein felt that everyone in the audience  could  learn something from hearing the concerto as performed by Glenn Gould. With that introduction, Mr. Bernstein went on to conduct Brahms Concerto in D Minor with Glenn Gould as the piano soloist, doing it Mr. Gould’s way.

 

The second story is in this week’s parasha which  relates the dispute between Moses and Korah. Korah, Moses' first cousin, is jealous that Aaron has been appointed High Priest.  To compound the issue, another cousin, Elitzafan, has been chosen as the head of the clan to which Korah belongs. Korah incites a revolt that challenges Moses’ leadership. Moses tries to reason with Korah and his followers, but they refuse to talk to him. The episode ends in tragedy, as Korah and his followers are swallowed up by the earth.

 

 These two stories raise the question of how we deal with disagreements, both personal and societal. Does one side have to win, and the other be destroyed, as in the Biblical story of Korah and his rebellion? Or is there a way to listen to one another with respect and understanding, even though, in the end, there is still no room for compromise, as in the story of Bernstein and Gould. The Maestro, after all, ended up performing the piece precisely Glenn Gould’s way. Yet no one was destroyed, their relationship endured, the audience was treated to an original  interpretation  of the Concerto and both parties went on to illustrious careers. 

 

Here we can learn something from the philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin. He rejects “relativism”, the idea that every side to a dispute has equal truth and equal validity. The relativist claims that there is no “absolute truth” -- every opinion is equally true. The relativist claims that there is no “true” and “false” when it comes to beliefs and opinions. Rather, Isaiah Berlin favors a way of viewing disputes that he calls “pluralism”. A pluralistic understanding of disputes is that honest people, through their reasoning can attain  many different understandings of the” truth.” I can maintain that my view is “the truth” yet still respect those who have come to a different idea of “the truth”  arrived at through a sincere and thoughtful process. They may not share my understanding of the truth, but I can still respect them and be friendly with them. I do not need to destroy them, insult them, or delegitimize them. They are my fellow disputants, not my mortal enemies. I may even learn a thing or two from them! 

 

The Talmud is full of disputes like this. The Talmud records all  the opinions of the Rabbis on various sides of a dispute for posterity. The most famous of these are the disputes between the School of Hillel and the School of Shammai. In exploring the Bible to determine how G-d wants us to live our lives, they often come to diametrically opposite conclusions. In other words, two opposing “truths' '!  Most of the time, we live our lives according to the opinions of Hillel. But, say the rabbis, that does not mean that the opinions of Shammai are not to be respected. They are to be preserved. One day, the opinions of Hillel may be put aside and we will govern our lives according to the opinions of Shammai. The opinions of Hillel may  be true only for our time! 

 

Both Hillel and Shammai and Bernstein and Gould model what we can call “healthy controversy”. This can take place only when we approach a dispute or debate with intellectual honesty and a desire to truly listen, with understanding, to the “truth” of others. A healthy controversy can only take place when we refrain from denigrating or insulting one another. It can only take place when we are motivated by a true desire to engage the other, and not with the goal to devalue, demean,  embarrass or overpower the other with our” brilliance” and rhetorical mastery. The rabbis call these healthy controversies “disputes for the sake of heaven”. May all of our controversies be …..”For the Sake of Heaven”.

Shabbat Shalom

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash